Officials advocate for appropriation of military biofuel funding

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack are advocating for the funding of military biofuels programs. On Jan. 2, the secretaries issued a letter to Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, asking for support of the Defense Production Act biofuel efforts.

The initiative, cosponsored by the USDA, U.S. DOE and U.S. Department of Defense, works with the private sector to accelerate the development of advanced biofuels. Within the letter, the secretaries asked Mikulski to continue her commitment to the effort by supporting President Obama’s budget request for fiscal year 2014 to provide transfer authority for the Secretary of Energy for activates pursuant to the DPA and to provide the requested funding.

“America needs a diversified, balanced portfolio of energy options,” they wrote in the letter. “This is particularly true for the nation’s transportations sector which relies almost exclusively on liquid, petroleum-based fuels. Even as we have experienced very promising developments in the domestic oil and natural gas markets during this decade, oil prices remain tied to the global petroleum fuel market. As long as that is the case, America will be tethered to the persistent economic and security challenges associated with global oil markets. That is why an enduring strategy to increase energy efficiency and develop a competitive domestic renewable fuels industry will help strengthen our national security, lower costs for consumers, and reduce environmental impacts.”

Approximately one week before the secretaries issued the letter, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 into law. Within the text of the bill was a brief provision related to drop-in fuels. It indicates that the funds appropriated to the DOD could be used to make bulk purchases of drop-in fuels for operational purposes only if those fuels were cost-competitive with traditional petroleum-based fuels. It also included a waiver provision that allows the Secretary of Defense to waive the limitation as long as a notice of the waiver for the purchase is submitted to the congressional defense committees within 30 days.

Michael McAdams, president of the Advanced BioFuels Association, weighed in on the letter and appropriations process and told Biomass Magazine he thinks the outlook looks good for military efforts to use advanced biofuels.

McAdams stressed that for the first time in two years, military authorization legislation did not send any negative signals to the lawmakers in charge of appropriations with respect to programs concerning the use of advanced biofuels in the military. “The provisions in the authorization bill basically encourage the use of drop-in fuels by the military so long as they are economically competitive with other fuels,” he said, noting that there are two major pieces to the appropriations puzzle.

In the first piece of the puzzle the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee put forth an authorization bill. That step became complete when President Obama signed the NDAA into law on Dec. 26. In the second piece of the puzzle is the appropriations process where members of congressional appropriations committees appropriate funds to authorized programs. The letter issued by the secretaries essentially advocates for the appropriation of funds to authorized military biofuel programs.

“This is good news for advanced biofuels. The continued partnership and continued vision by the U.S. military to try to move forward with…[advanced biofuels] has great opportunity and is very helpful in [creating] a demand pull for our industry,” McAdams said. “Our hats off to the men and women in the U.S. military and to the vision of the three secretaries that signed this letter and continue to work with us on a daily basis to try to build this great industry.”

3 Responses

Are military biofuels the same price as conventional petroleum fuels? If they are higher, these programs should be scrapped until biofuels are cost competitive. The U. S. government goes in debt at least $500 billion per year and any activities that contribute to the debt should be eliminated.
It is time to eliminate programs that take money from the poor and give it to the rich and political campaign contributors.
James H. Rust, Professor of nuclear engineering.

The liberal agenda would have you believe global warming is solely created fron carbon based fuels. Biomass based biofuels do offer reduced emissions but still at a higher cost. In time costs will decline in the meantime this remains a political game of chess. Giant King Grass IMO does offer a solution with lower cost and greater yield then corn stover. Time will tell if America is ready.
Guatemala was not and now has rising corn prices and reduced farming for the poor.

This is more taxpayer fleecing and open fraud. "Drop-in" biofuels today are still $30-$60 a gallon. The most recent price paid by the Air Force and Army for biofuel is $59.00 per gallon to Gevo for jet fuel.
There are hard limits of photosynthesis, thermodynamics, and critical fossil fuel dependencies in cultivated agriculture that limit liquid biofuels to always being more expensive per unit of energy delivered than fossil fuels. Even the Department of Energy reports that corn ethanol, after 8 years of $6 billion-per-year subsidies is still 85 cents more per gallon than gasoline per unit of energy put in the gas tank and biodiesel is 61 cents more per gallon (http://www.afdc.energy.gov/publications/search/keyword/?q=alternative%20fuel%20price%20report).
It is sad how little these administration officials understand about the relationship between biofuels and fossil fuels and food agriculture. If the price of oil or gas skyrockets, so does the price of food and biofuels because they are critically dependent upon natural gas and petroleum for fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, equipment fuel, processing plant energy, and hydrotreatment hydrogen. There is simply never going to be a price crossover. The recent price paid by the US Air Force to GEVO for bio-jet fuel in March of 2013 was the same $59 a gallon it paid for two purchases in 2012, and it is higher than the $48/gal average price the US military has paid for the 1.4 million gallons of biofuel it has purchased from various vendors since 2009. The price is not coming down and there is no looming breakthrough.
Continuing to flush taxpayer money down this drain is an unconscionable crime being perpetrated by political sycophants who are more concerned about their careers than true national security or energy security. DoD and USDA and DoE are bound and determined to give away $510 million dollars on new biorefineries to please Obama, and all they require for the snake oil entrepreneur to get a fistful of taxpayer millions is to promise that they will produce a biofuel blend by 2016 for $4 a gallon. Since there is no restriction on the proportion of biofuel to petroleum in the blend, this worthless promise can be satisfied today by simply blending 2% of $59.00/gal biofuel into 98% of $3.50/gal petroleum fuel.
BTW, DoE already spent $603 million on 23 new biorefineries in 2010. How much cost-competitive biofuel have Americans gotten from that investment? Zero. Google "biofuel bankruptcy" to get a list of the scores of idled biorefineries currently available at fire-sale prices. Brazil has stopped constructing new biorefineries and is running their current fleet of 442 at only 59% capacity. There is absolutely no reason to build a single one more.

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